See previous posts about the lockdown that occurred in spring 2020 and how I used the time spent at home to study Ableton Live 10 at a well known music education institution. Below are my comments on assignment 11, which was the final work that we did. We put quite some work into the last 3 assignments, since the final was to be submitted as a video recording of ourselves performing the piece. This assignment was also a large part of the assesment base of the course.
I created an instrument rack that featured a glitch drum kit, a grand piano and a pad. The kit was assigned to the lowest octave of my keyboard. The grand piano from there and upwards to the highest note. The pad was placed at the top octave and transposed 2 octaves to sound midrange. This way I had one flexible keyboard set up that I could use for all parts of my tune. I assigned my foot controller, 2 rotary knobs and mod wheel to the glitch kit. That way I could controll pitch, wet/dry delay which affected the sound. Two more rotary knobs were assigned to control the filter cutoff and resonance of the pad. My role as performer was mainly to do improvised changes to the drum kit and the pad, whereas I played the theme and piano solo using the grand piano sound. I have few scenes, and the scenes were triggered using my Novation Launch pad. I composed the piece using session view, and made an arrangement for assignment 10. But I found it more conveninent to revert to the session I used for composing rather than converting the arrangement back to session. So this is how my attempt to make a Nu Jazz piece ended. I feel that some ideas have been carried over from the inspirational track by Bugge Wesseltoft New Conception of Jazz. Ableton is very flexible and opens up for many possible ways of improvising during a musical performance.
Below is the internal audio recording of the performance shown in the video above. This was done by first recording the session in Live and then exporting the audio:
